Chris Curtis Web Site

I have a “love/hate” relationship with sprint orienteering. I stayed away from it for a long time. I am not a fast runner at the best of times, and certainly not a sprinter and I love being in forests and wild country so it seemed less attractive. As my club’s summer “park-O” events mutated into sprints I joined in and soon discovered that the essence of the sport is definitely there - very strongly - in sprint orienteering.

On a well-planned sprint course there are very real navigational challenges. In a complex environment like a University campus, with all sorts of buildings, roads, fences, hedges and more the map and ground is crammed with detail. You are challenged to simplify to the right level. Simplify too much and you run straight past a control or miss a vital short cut, simplify too little and you are overwhelmed with detail and choose poor routes. It is definitely real orienteering, but at speed.

This was a great event. It was by far the sunniest and warmest day of the summer (not brilliant for fast running on pavement and lawn but very welcome after all the gloom and wet) and with hundreds of people, from lots of clubs it had something of the special occasion. The format was a first race around lunchtime, with random starts, then a second, slightly longer race with starts in reverse order of time for the first race.  For most people this left an hour or two between. The grass was covered with orienteers having picnics and it gave the event a pleasant “laid back” and social atmosphere. This approach also meant that you were usually running with a number of others in sight during the second race, as you caught up with the people in front of you and were being caught by faster people behind.

Both races demanded careful route choice. None of the controls was particularly hard to locate, but it was easy to find yourself on the wrong side of an uncrossable wall, or climbing up a steep bank only to have to come down it again, when you did not need to.

I was pleased not to miss any controls (something I was very prone to do during the club’s sprint series) and navigated cleanly, but I ran much slower than I have been doing recently. It was my slowest pace for many months. I have been doing 5k training runs, cross country, recently at around 7 minutes per km and on the very clean surfaces on campus I could not break 10 mins per km. I am not sure why. I just could not get into my running and felt heavy and was very quickly out of breath. Part of it may be that the campus is quite hilly and I live somewhere very flat - and have been training on virtually flat terrain. I found the hills very hard. Having said that, I was almost as slow on the flat sections and not very fast downhill so I do not think it explains everything.

A lot of it is mental. Maybe I need a psychologist like the olympic cyclists! I really enjoy navigation in orienteering. I get a buzz when I nail a control, especially if I have avoided some potential pitfalls, and it feels good where the route has been smooth, efficient and accurate, but I find it hard to add the word “fast” to that list. I tend to overthink and rationalise things like route choice, throwing all sorts of techniques and thinking through all kinds of possibilities, when what I really need to do is simplify the problem, apply the right technique to the leg or section of a leg, and do all the excellent navigation really fast. If you do not do this on a sprint, it really shows. In the season ahead, I need to focus on keeping it simple in that way.

So the result was nothing to write home about, but I enjoyed the event and the sunshine. I thought the courses were really high quality and I am very glad I was there.